The Jackdaw

Tag: Duveen Galleries

  • Editorial – May 2017

    TATE BRITAIN NEEDS ITS IDENTITY BACK

    In recent issues I’ve described how since 1945 the education, bureaucracy and exponentially increasing cash for the visual arts have been usurped and dominated by an evolving one-track mindset which, in these pages, is called State Art. This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Orwell among others, is complete with the recent appointment of Doctor Balshaw as overall Director of the Tate (see last editorial). She understands nothing but that which is ‘Contemporary’, a qualification (if that is an appropriate description) which makes her uniquely unsuitable for running three galleries with what should be historical and scholarly functions.

    The sad truth now is that the Tate has become a gallery of contemporary art with a marginalised historical concession on the side, whereas its original function was the reverse of this. The revolution that has taken place for this to happen over the last half century is an object lesson in change by incremental stealth. It is the perfect demonstration of what Rudi Dutschke meant when, confronted with the fact that a successful immediate proletarian revolution was impossible in western Europe, he referred to the necessity to operate clandestinely from inside, a process he famously dubbed “the long march through the institutions”. This would, he predicted, lead to the eventual substitution of one establishment by another independent of any popular support. And in the case of the contemporary visual arts this means a far more repressive, hidebound and authoritarian regime than the one it replaced.

    Writing in 1971 political scientist Leonard Schapiro observed: “[T]he true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” He was referring to Stalinism but he might just as easily have said it about an equally dictatorial State Art. Such is the blind faith in the New Scripture for Contemporary Art, and the impossibility of apostasy from it (like membership of the Euro the only exit from State Art is a door marked Disaster), that any attempt to question the evolving orthodoxy and monopoly has condemned any would-be non-conformist to immediate ostracism. The predictable chorus of positive opinion at the appointment of Dr Quack is evidence of this common fear of being targeted as a “jarring dissonant” and the career disaster it portends. Her inadequacies are blindingly obvious but who in the arts commentariat actually mentioned them? There is now a terror in the visual arts of telling even a fraction of the truth. Thus has State Art been allowed to prosper in a parallel universe impenetrable to public interest and criticism which renders its functionaries untouchable and self-perpetuating, and – like Moonies – eternally pleased with themselves.

    With Dr Q’s appointment, and the earlier elevation of a contemporary art specialist to head Tate Britain, the takeover of the institutions is complete. We have arrived at Dutschke’s Year Zero. The art of Now has become its own justification, as if nothing before matters. This is the curious process by which an uncoupled past has become an irrelevance. If it goes in any direction at all the story of art now travels backwards, and not very far back at that. State Art-approved galleries have become locked in the bubble of a continuous present inside which nearly all recent ‘masterpieces’ and ‘challenges’, ‘subversions’ and ‘explorations’ are almost instantly forgotten because really they were meritless to start with and their importance routinely overstated. Yesterday’s work is replaced swiftly by today’s and accompanied by the now familiar hyperbole, for in the visual arts we are trapped on the treadmill of perpetual mediocrity.

    Consider this. In 1946 there were two curators and one director at the Tate. There are now 17 directors alone. On the Tate’s website they don’t publish a full staff organisation chart, most probably because that would give away the scale of empire-building that has recently gone on there (despite its predictable annual cries of poverty). Instead 46 staff are listed as examples of what they call “the broad range of academic and professional expertise in the organisation”. In fact, the ‘range’ it describes is the narrowest of bottlenecks. Over two thirds of the staff on this list are modern and contemporary curators, mainly the latter; a fifth relate to art before 1920; and the rest are dedicated to conservation and managerial wonks with mystifying job titles.

    Such a bias in favour of the contemporary is justified at Tate Modern but it isn’t a prejudice appropriate at Tate Britain or the two satellites reliant on its historical collection. These galleries should show and research what is established and not that which is either speculative, market driven or the current whim of a dominant, highly prejudiced clique of curators and their favourite dealers.

     

    And so it is urgently necessary to split off Tate Modern from the rest of the franchise. A different ethos must apply at Tate Britain, a gallery whose historical works should be its justification not its embarrassment. Not all the Tate’s galleries should have to pay the necessary lip service to Schapiro’s “uniform pattern” demanded by State Art, as is currently the case.

    This dismantling of Serota’s unwieldy empire has been mooted before but now he’s gone for good it’s an urgent necessity, especially when we have a scholarly nobody in charge of the world’s most important collection of historical British art. It is a serious crime of negligence to abandon the organisation to the leadership it has. Having someone in charge of Tate Britain who has no credibility in the history of British Art might be fine in a gallery of contemporary art – even then it’s not exactly desirable – but it is perverse in an institution which began life in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art ­– which was, incidentally, run until 1954 by the National Gallery.

    Tate Britain today is heading relentlessly in the direction of becoming a museum of Modern and Contemporary British art with some history attached. If you have a person in charge whose knowledge stretches back only to the week before last this continued drift is inevitable.

    The space for work before 1920 is constantly being squeezed. Currently the building is split into three parts. The vast middle strip, the Duveen Galleries, is customarily wasted promoting an over-rated contemporary. At the moment it is White Cuber Cerith Wyn Evans with sprawling, incoherent patterns of white neon tubing signifying only he knows what. A ‘Senior Curator of Contemporary Art’ writes of this piece on an ‘information’ board: “In this commission CWE has responded to the space of the Duveen Galleries by creating a neon installation which focuses on ideas around the folds and flows of energy via material and immaterial conduits.” Only the author knows what that means. So the gallery’s middle third is wasted.

    The eastern third is modern British art since roughly 1920, much of it minor and nearly all of it illustrative of the Modernist Creed. At the far end Hockney currently occupies galleries which usually act as a graveyard for the latest Turner Prize. In the front corner is the Turner annexe, now also used to house Constables which used to live in what is a new ‘installation’ space.

    The western third used to be all history and is the most popular section. Visited but not crowded it is a perfect place to study those pictures which are hung well enough for the purpose; that is, low enough and not skied as many paintings are here. A shop has intruded at the south end to make way for an ‘Art Now’ gallery on the ‘modern’ side where the shop used to be. Large installation spaces and a photography gallery have also cut sizeable chunks out of this wing. The impression is of a distant history tolerated by being piled high in a restricted space, but which is far from celebrated.

    Tate Britain urgently needs it own identity. The current regime will not deliver this because all they are capable of understanding is “material and immaterial conduits”.

    David Lee
    The Jackdaw May/Jun 2017

  • Sense and Sensibility

    HalfordsSo it’s goodbye Cornelissens hello Halfords.

    Laura Gascoigne parks her brush and tries to follow the instructions for flatpack art, but has the picture upside down

    It’s a dull job being a customs officer, sitting on the border twiddling your thumbs until the next teenage drugs mule comes along. So it must have added to the gaiety of nations when in 2010 the EU Commission passed a ruling imposing full VAT import duty on electrical components and household appliances used in art. Henceforth disassembled light tubes from a Dan Flavin sculpture would be charged full whack at 20% of the work’s value instead of the preferential ‘art’ rate of 5%. It might be art when assembled in the gallery, ran the argument, but disassembled in transit it counted as light fittings. Sic transit gloria artis mundi.

    The wheels of the European Commission grind exceedingly slowly, but they’d better sort this one out before it causes tailbacks at Dover while fine art carriers loaded with DIY supplies discuss the finer points of art theory at Customs. Outsider artists have always used materials from hardware stores – nail mosaics are a popular genre, and a sealant Jesus sold a few years ago for £750 – but now that the definition of ‘found object’ has been extended to objects found in the aisles of Wickes, the DIY aesthetic has official sanction.

    We should have seen it coming when Jim Lambie was given planche blanche in 2003 to cover the floor of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in trippy stripes of multicoloured vinyl tape. The previous year, the Taiwanese artist Michael Lin had carpeted the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in giant pink flowers inspired by Taiwanese embroidery. Since then the flooring contractors have been gaining ground, and commercial galleries are now entering the market. Two years ago the Alan Cristea Gallery transformed itself into a flooring showroom with the site-specific installation D.I.Y by Richard Woods, who covered walls and floor “in his trademark vibrantly-coloured and exaggerated wood-grain motif… installed as parquetry”. Naffness being a key ingredient in the DIY aesthetic’s demotic appeal, there is now apparently an art market for parquet.

    When Martin Creed clad the walls and floors of the downstairs toilets at the London Library’s new Mason Yard extension in his trademark vibrantly-coloured patchwork of marble tiles, I suspect he didn’t do the grouting himself, belonging as he does to the ‘You Do It’ YBA boomer generation. Today’s austerity generation of DIY strivers is more hands-on. For the tar and rubber paintings in his exhibition Freedom of Assembly at White Cube, Bermondsey (until July 5th), African American social practice artist Theaster Gates conscientiously developed “good roofing strategies… to arrive at painting or at least to get to the essence of roofing.”

    The aim these days is no longer for a high-tech Hirstian finish designed to appeal to billionaire collectors, but for a low-tech Bodgit & Scarper look – an abject object – worthy of exhibition in a socially responsible public gallery. It’s one in the eye for modernism’s utopian belief in the transformative power of functional form. As Ralph Rugoff said of the 30 international artists in the Hayward Gallery’s 2010 exhibition The New Décor, “what unites them is their ability to transform objects we associate with the everyday – a bed, a shelf, a lamp – into something uncanny and compelling [so as to] open up the discussion about interior space… with interpretations ranging from the absurd to the abject to the lyrical.”

    In this context, the lyrical tends to take the form of nostalgia for the bright new dawn of the post-war DIY movement. Today’s social anthropologists may claim that self-assembly furniture puts the contemporary male in touch with his hunter-gatherer roots – apparently it’s a stag night ritual in Sweden for the groom to bid a final adieu to bachelordom by assembling a piece of IKEA furniture – but wrestling a flat pack to the ground in a drunken stupor is a piece of piss compared with the challenges facing the original DIY pioneers. Their frontier spirit was celebrated in Untitled: Simparch, a 2005 exhibition at Tate Modern in which a group of American artists used instructions from the 1960s popular manual Plywood Working for Everybody to produce a range of exhibits from a ‘Fishing Tackle Cabinet’ to a ‘Storage Headboard’. The Tate described these objects, unfairly I thought, as “elements of an affluent, post-war vision of suburban domestic living” whose need was “fuelled by the ownership of material goods rather than basic necessity”. It seems to me that a fishing tackle cabinet is a must-have accessory for any hunter-gatherer, ditto a cupboard for storing trophy heads.

    But seriously, can this stuff be considered art? Those with doubts on the subject may be reassured to learn that amongst Franz Kafka’s early works was a volume entitled Accident Prevention Regulations in the Use of Wood-Planing Machines, dating from the author’s formative period in ’elf and safety (during which he is also said to have invented the hard hat). A Kafkaesque edge of surrealism is what most DIY artworks appear to aspire to. In 2003 the artist-run gallery Cubitt, at the cutting-edge of plywood as of so much else, hosted an exhibition cheerily titled HEY PRODUCTION! that took its cue from another pioneering handbook, Victor Papanek and James Hennessey’s Nomadic Furniture (1973). The show was organised by the self-styled Copenhagen Free University, a Danish outfit specializing in disseminating “forms of knowledge that are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, acapitalist, produced in the kitchen, produced when asleep, arisen on a social excursion – collectively”. They may have missed the passage in Kafka’s handbook warning against operating machinery when asleep, but fortunately no injury seems to have resulted.

    It’s fair to say that, apart an unhealthy obsession with subverting sideboards and debunking bunk beds – The New Décor included a bed shaped like an LA freeway overpass by Cuban carpentry collective Los Carpinteros – the DIY art movement does no real harm. All art is Do-It-Yourself, after all. If you’re alone in your studio, who else is going to do it? And functional failure is something every artist is familiar with. As the Swiss sculptor Urs Fischer put it in an interview: “As soon as I start to work with materials, things go wrong.” Still, when Baudelaire defined ‘modernity’ as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent; the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable,” he wasn’t thinking of plywood, he was thinking of paint, a medium in which an eternal and immutable record of the ephemeral and fugitive can be trapped. DIY art is a whole other ball game: it makes a fetish of the fugitive and laughs at eternity. In Baudelaire’s artistic terms, it’s a game of one half.

    On this year’s Turner Prize shortlist is a collective of designers and architects calling themselves Assemble who “embrace a DIY sensibility”, according to the Tate. They’ve been nominated for their work with local communities improving a rundown estate in Toxteth, Liverpool and ‘rethinking’ an adventure playground in Dalmarnock, Glasgow. Adrian Searle predicts that making the world a better place through DIY efforts “is something artists… are going to have to be doing a lot more of in the coming years”. He may have a point, but it’s a limited one. DIY efforts can turn pedestrian dreams into reality, but only art can turn pedestrian reality into dreams.

    Laura Gascoigne